The Mayor and City Council (M&CC) yesterday approved a motion to send Town Clerk Beulah Williams and City Treasurer Roderick Edinboro on immediate leave so that investigations could be carried out in the treasurer’s department.
The motion specifies that a team be set up to carry out the investigation, meet Minister of Local Government and Regional Development Kellawan Lall and to identify replacements, if necessary, for the Town Clerk and City Treasurer.
This follows a report by the Auditor General (AG) following a January 15 request by the mayor for the AG to investigate the financial system of the Treasurer’s Department.
At a meeting held at City Hall yesterday afternoon to discuss the ramifications of the AG’s report, councillors accused officers — in particular, the Town Clerk and the Treasurer — of being part of an inadequate and compromised system.
The specific areas, which the AG examined, were wages and salaries, for which records are not being properly maintained; officers being given payment in lieu of leave without proper authority or approval; advances and loans to officers; deduction of officers’ deposits; bank reconciliation statements; assessment and collection of rates and taxes and information systems costs. Several recommendations were made in the report to rectify the irregularities found.
The investigation covered the period, January to December 2007. The report revealed that a number of officers were promoted or given raises in salaries without the following proper protocol being followed.
Councillors were in an uproar yesterday, with one even calling for the matter to be brought to the attention of the police. One councillor said that the AG’s report showed evidence of serious irregularities and “blatant misuse of taxpayers’ money.” He pointed out that people have faced the courts and have been dismissed for far less.
Responding later to the accusations, the Town Clerk said that everything she had done was within her scope and in accordance with the authority given to her in the Municipal and District Councils Act. She said several of the areas examined were emoluments approved and authorised by her, which do not go to the council.
Defending paying officers for leave not taken, the Town Clerk said that in 2006 a number of officers had proceeded on leave. At the end of that year, the municipality was plagued with a number of issues including no lights. Williams said the Mayor then pinned the problems on the leave taken by her and the officers saying that they had proceeded on vacation leaving the council in shambles. Williams said she vowed that situation would not recur and paid some officers for one month’s leave when they were owed 42 days instead.
“I agree it shouldn’t have happened but these were extreme situations,” Williams told Stabroek News yesterday, adding that the salary increases given were also within her jurisdiction.
She also said that the AG’s investigation, in her opinion, did not discover any fraud as was being suggested by councillors; rather it discovered “systemic weaknesses” that officers were working on.
Mayor Hamilton Green, in a short statement, said officers have openly “flouted the decisions of the council” and have exercised their “Caesar-like power to do what they like when they feel like it.” He said that any reassurances given by the Town Clerk that situations would change could not be taken seriously since the situation has been ongoing for years and was evident in a number of other investigations carried out by consultants in the past.
Green said the administration has been given ample time to right its wrongs and it was now time for serious action to be taken. (Melissa Charles)
